The effect of televised candidate debates on the support for political parties

During campaigns for legislative elections, a large portion of the general public follows televised debates between the front-running candidates. How can the candidates use the public interest in the debates to increase the support for their party? In this article, we argue that especially challenger candidates can improve the public perception of their valence qualities, such as personal integrity, leadership, and competence, and can - as a result - raise the support of their party. We expect that the perceived policy stances of the candidates matter less. Building on televised debate experiments during the German Federal Elections of 2009 and 2013, we analyse the effect of the debates on party vote and in how far this relationship is mediated by changes in valence and policy evaluations of the candidates. Results show that changes of candidate valence, but not changes in policy perceptions, of the social-democratic front-running candidates mediate the vote intention for the party. Respondents who perceived the candidates more competent, empathetic and have integrity as a result of the debate are more likely to vote for the candidate's party. Our analysis further reveals, however, that this valence effect is not long-lasting and does not carry-over to vote intention briefly before the election.     

Capturing vote-seeking incentives and the cultivation of a personal and party vote

Electoral rules establish incentives that encourage candidates to strike a particular balance between cultivating their own personal reputations and cultivating shared party reputations. Higher levels of intraparty competition stress the need for an individual reputation and minimize the usefulness of a shared, party reputation. We develop a new indicator of intraparty competition that addresses shortcomings pointed out in previously used indicators. We also identify new, particularly intuitive indicators of ”personal” and ”party” vote seeking. Using within-system and across-system variation in parliamentary elections in Japan, we find that candidate manifestos contain more frequent uses of first-person pronouns and candidate names and fewer references to political parties when intraparty competition is stiffest.     

Nomination and list placement of ethnic minorities under open-list proportional rules: The centrality of ethnopolitical context

Do parties respond to ethnopolitical context when nominating and placing ethnic minority candidates in open-list proportional representation (PR) systems? Open-list PR is by nature candidate centered. Candidates need to attract preference votes to succeed. Political leaders, we argue, anticipate candidates' ability to generate support and the extent of anti-minority sentiment in districts when nominating and placing candidates. To test our arguments, we analyze data on 8945 candidates competing across 124 localities in Latvia's 2017 local elections. Few studies have explored open-list systems in countries like Latvia where preference voting routinely alters list order. Other studies stress the role that context plays in ethnic minority representation, but often lack data on crucial indicators. Our results show that parties nominated more minority candidates in localities with more ethnic minority voters and fewer in those with larger noncitizen populations. We did not, however, find that ethnopolitical context affected list placement.     

我国私募基金的法律规制

私募基金立法要以效率为首要价值目标,以发挥私募基金的优势。私募基金投资者具有自我保护能力,因此规范私募基金要尊重当事人的自治。我国缺乏私募基金发展的信用环境,对私募基金的立法要以不损害其发展为前提的适度监管。     

Candidate positioning in Britain

Policy positioning has received a great deal of attention from scholars of British politics. While numerous studies emphasize the positions taken by the Labour and Conservative parties, and how the positions of these parties have shaped citizens’ electoral behavior, few studies explore policy positioning at the candidate-level. We conduct the first quantitative study that examines the relative policy positions of British candidates during a general election. Building on findings from the study of American elections, we argue that two factors explain variation in candidate positioning in Britain: constituency-level electoral competition and a disparity in candidate quality. Using data from the 2001 British Representation Study, we find evidence that both factors are associated with a decrease in the policy contrast between candidates. Our findings suggest that, despite the differences in party control, similar factors affect candidate positioning in both Great Britain and the United States.     

村干部竞选者的竞选动机及特点——基于需求ERG理论的实证研究

基于需求ERG理论与适应性行为理论,研究讨论了我国现阶段参与村干部选举中的竞选者动机,并根据事实驱动的研究策略,构建了参与村干部竞选的竞选动机量表,分析了现阶段我国村干部竞选者的竞选动机特征.研究表明,村干部竞选者参与竞选主要包括社会关系、经济收入、权力权利、公共服务和跟风盲从等五种动机.研究发现,从村干部竞选者整体来看,最重要竞选动机是对社会关系的追求,其次是对经济收入和权力权利的追求,对公共服务和对跟风盲从的追求显著低于前三者;从村干部竞选者个体来看,基于性别、年龄、教育、收入、工作经历等不同的需求各异的竞选者竞选动机各有不同.研究丰富了我们对村民自治参与的认识、农民政治参与的认识,为村庄选举制度的完善提供了理论依据.     

论对私募基金的法律规制

私募基金最主要的特征在于以私募方式设立，其投资者必须为具有自我保护能力的合格投资者且不得超过一定数量。私募基金不得以广告、公开或变相公开方式发行，应根据发行人与劝诱对象之间是否存在“既存的实质联系”来判断发行方式是否构成公开。为了防止私募基金公开化，对私募基金份额的转售行为必须加以一定限制。信息披露是私募发行制度中的一项重要内容，贯穿于发行与转售两个阶段。     

Incumbency advantage and candidate characteristics in open-list proportional representation systems: Evidence from Indonesia

We use evidence from Indonesia's April 2014 legislative elections to study the relationship between incumbency, list position, candidate characteristics, and electoral success in open-list PR systems. Contrary to a recent literature identifying an incumbency disadvantage in other large developing democracies, we identify a consistent personal incumbency advantage in Indonesia. However, we argue that this advantage is mediated by party choices over how incumbents and newcomers are ranked on party lists, a key heuristic for voters in low-information electoral environments such as Indonesia.     

PTV gap: A new measure of party identification yielding monotonic partisan attitudes and supporting comparative analysis

Despite the cornerstone role of party identification for analyzing voting behavior in the United States, its measurement (in terms of the classic American National Electoral Studies – ANES – seven-point scale) is affected by a systematic problem of non-monotonicity, and it proved impossible to be directly applied outside the United States. We introduce a novel, complementary measurement approach aimed at addressing both problems. We test on US data (an expressly collected computer-assisted web interviewing survey dataset) a new, seven-point scale of partisanship constructed from PTV (propensity-to-vote) items, acting as projective devices for capturing partisan preferences, and routinely employed in multi-party systems. We show that a PTV-based (suitable for comparative analysis) seven-point scale of partisanship outperforms the classic ANES scale. Groups identified by the new scale show monotonic partisan attitudes, and the comparison of multivariate models of political attitudes testify significantly larger effects for the new scale, as well as an equal or higher predictive ability on a range of political attitudes.     

Can Partisan Cues Diminish Democratic Accountability?

When evaluating political candidates, citizens can draw on partisan stereotypes and use partisan cues to make inferences about the candidates’ issue positions without undertaking a costly information search. As long as candidates adopt policy positions that are congruent with partisan stereotypes, partisan cues can help citizens make an accurate voting decision with limited information. However, if candidates take counter-stereotypical positions, it is incumbent upon citizens to recognize it and adjust their evaluations accordingly. Using the dual-processing framework, I hypothesize about the conditions under which individuals reduce their reliance on partisan cues and scrutinize counter-stereotypical messages, and test these hypotheses with experimental data collected from a nationally representative sample of adults. The findings show that whether individuals punish a candidate from their party for taking a counter-stereotypical position is contingent on the salience of the issue and the political awareness of the message recipient. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and normative implications of these findings.